Bir Zamanlar Anadolu’da
Nuri Bilge Ceylan (2011)
About ninety minutes into this film, one of the men investigating the crime at the centre of the story starts typing a report into his laptop. He asks another man to confirm the location of where they are – I can’t remember the name of the place but it begins with K. The other man gives a lengthy explanation which boils down to ‘It depends’. (They’re in a valley, K is on one side of the valley and somewhere else not beginning with K is on the other side, and so on.) The man who asks the question is exasperated by the reply. So was I, although from the chuckles to be heard in the Renoir it was clear not everyone in the audience felt the same way. I enjoyed Corneliu Porumboiu’s humorous dramatisation of the boredom of detective work in Police, Adjective (2009) but I can’t understand how anyone can care what happens, or doesn’t happen, in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. (It was stupefying to see this film so soon after The Kid with a Bike, with which Ceylan’s movie shared the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2011.) The characters’ conversations – switching from the here and now (food, urination) to the metaphysical (musings about time and death) and back again – are clearly an important part of what appeals to its admirers but the unanswered question about K brought me to my feet and out of the cinema. There was still over an hour to go.
Although Ceylan is dealing with a very particular place and describing the social rituals and the attitudes of the people in it, fans of Once Upon a Time in Anatolia seem to see the murder investigation in the film as something larger – perhaps they even see universal, there-are-no-simple-answers-in-life significance in the uncertainties about the place beginning with K. A question more easily answered – in the negative – is whether the droll philosophical discursions of the script would be reckoned to have humour and depth if the film were in the English language. Ceylan’s reputation being what it is, he can hardly fail with some critics with this take on the police procedural: he bores us and is praised for masterly subversion of the genre. He did the screenplay with his wife Ebru and Ercan Kasel – the same trio who wrote Ceylan’s previous film Three Monkeys (which was also overpraised but considerably more watchable than this one). As in Three Monkeys, there is symbolically extreme weather and plenty of other beautifully composed images, perfectly lit by Gökhan Tiryaki. These are often images of men’s faces which, because some of them are heavy and not obviously sensitive, are all the more remarkable because the actors’ eyes are emotionally alert. For me, though, the direction drains the characters, and what they’re doing and saying, of interest.
27 March 2012
